SITEMAP Explained

SITEMAP

Sitemap is list urls of all the pages present on there website. Its a easy way to inform search engines about all pages on their sites that are available for indexing (for listing in search results). Webmasters can make easy for crawlers by including additional data about each URL such as the update time,the frequency of update,and the importance of page.It can be your RSS feed url.Some blogging platforms automatically generates sitemaps such as wordpress and blogger users can submit Feed urls as sitemaps.But feed urls are not recommended because they shows latest pages only.

Basic site-map looks like this -

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

1.URL OF SITE :
- Between <loc></loc> tags you have to write URL of the page.
- This is required field in sitemap, you can't ignore this.
- The url should be search engine friendly means it must begin with protocol such as ( http:// ) and end with trailing slash.
- It should not be longer than 2048 characters. (Its a maximum number of characters you can write in one line in the text editors after)

2. LAST MODIFIED DATE :
- Between <lastmod></lastmod> tags write last modified date.
- This is an optional field, you can ignore this.
- You can use any date format written here :- http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime
- YYYY-MM-DD this format will be good for crawlers

3. CRAWLING RATE :
- Between <changefreq></changefreq> tags you can set time interval between two crawling.
- Its optional field.
- You can use these always commands in this tag - hourly,daily,weekly,monthly,yearly,never
- If you used hourly then its not guaranteed that they crawl your pages hourly,They try to keep time interval between two crawls lowest.and same for never, they will crawl this page if some one hyper-linked to this page.

4. IMPORTANCE OF LINK :
- Between <priority></priority> tag write the importance of your that page
- Its optional field.
- You can set this between 0 to 1, and the default value is 0.5 .

Some FAQ's about sitemap:

How to submit sitemap ?
1. Using webmasters : You can Submit your sitemap from webmasters tools
(Webmasters tools is recommended)
2. Direct method :
-To add this to google - http://google.com/ping?sitemap=http://example.com/sitemap.xml
- For other search engines just replace google.com with url of that search-engine.
3. You can submit sitemap from .txt file
- Just type every URL on separate line including protocol (http://)
- Go to Webmasters tools and enter link to this text file and your site map is now submitted to Google.

Can I include images/videos from sitemap
Obviously you can submit images , videos for indexing in Google search.
Using following attributes you can submit images,videos to search engines.

For Images :
- paste following code between <url> </url> tags
- Replace image url and add this in basic site map

<image:image>
<image:loc>http://example.com/image1.jpg</image:loc>
<image:loc>http://example.com/image2.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>
For Videos :
- paste this code between <url> </url> tags

<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc>
<video:player_loc allow_embed="yes" autoplay="ap=1">http://www.example.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123</video:player_loc>
<video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
<video:title>TITLE OF VIDEO </video:title>
<video:description>DESCRIPTION OF VIDEO</video:description>
</video:video>

whare :
content_loc - url of video-file E.g. video.flv
player_loc - Video player settings and location
thumbnail_loc - Its URL of thumbnail of video
title and description - these are information used for indexing.

IMPORTANT : Search-engines can not read flash/video files so the title and description are important

What if I have more than one site map ?
1.XML Sitemap Index
- You can include all sitemaps in one file using XML sitemap index.
- Sample sitemap index shown below :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc>
<lastmod>2004-10-01T18:23:17+00:00</lastmod>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

- The both attributes 'loc' and 'lastmod' used here are same as mentioned above.

Hosting sitemap on different domain ?
You can submit site-map from different site also [read carefully]
- If you are submitting site map of http://mysite1.com from http://mysite2.com then all urls in site map must point to http://mysite1.com .
- You can not submit one sitemap for two ore more different sites.
- Upload sitemap to main directory E.g. - http://mysite.com/sitemap.xml
- See example :-

1. http://example.com/images/sitemap.xml
For above sitemap,urls in the images directory are accessible E.g.- http://eample.com/images/a.html
following URLs not accessible
- http://example.com/index.html
- http://example.com/docs/
- https://example.com/ (its a secure http)

Amit K.
Recommended resources from Amit
- Drive traffic to your blog
- Google Analytics Explained
- Google webmasters tools Explained
- Page rank Explained
- SEO - Search Engine Optimization Explained

SITEMAP Explained

SITEMAP

Some FAQ's about sitemap:

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